Morning

            ‘Buy an alarm clock with a crowing rooster for only 100 pounds.’
            —The Leisure Circle, London Christmas Collection

But in my faraway country
We don’t need to wind up
A clock
To wake us up
From the depths of sleep.

The crowing of the rooster
Is enough, its chest
Thrust out, flapping
Its wings in a blur
Of rainbows.

Then comes the smoke rising
From the burning pile of leaves
My grandmother had swept
(The leaves had fallen in the night),
Now forming grey maps

Lost amongst the branches and twigs.
The air would fill
With the smell of frying garlic
Mixed with salt and rice,
And then the smell of small fish

That I like fried to a crisp.
In my faraway country,
The crowing of a rooster
And the smell of breakfast 
Are enough to wake us up

From our arctic dreams.
 
 
Insular Cold Storage and Ice Plant
(Built in 1898)
A nothingness like that of a ruined
Garden drifts in the wind
As my car goes down Quezon Bridge.

The old building the colour of faded roses
Is gone. I thought I could still hear
The revolutionaries’ voices 

When it was just being built,
The guns of war that it survived,
Even the many stories told

By the Pasig River meandering beside it. 
While my car speeds down this old
Bridge, in an afternoon that desperately

Just wants to rest, I feel as if a most
Familiar molar had been pulled.
 
 
Bats on Boracay Island
The drilling of their machines
Undoes me.

It wakes me from my sleep when,
In tensile grace, my feet cling

To strongest twig
And I rest on a soft bed

Of sea-scented air.
But the sound of their hammering,

Constant as blasts of light,
Shatters the sheen of silence.

Is the fate of my batwing black
About to turn white

Like the corals
Now dead under the sea?